by Susan Breen
“I don’t know,” Winifred said. “I have to think. I’ve got to get my head straight.”
The noon whistle sounded right then, a sound that always startled Maggie, mainly because it never sounded at noon. There was no way to prepare yourself for it. Sometimes it blared at five minutes to twelve and sometimes five minutes after, but whenever it blared, it always surprised her, and by the time the sirens finally stopped sounding, Winifred had hung up.
Chapter 15
Maggie woke Sunday morning with a sense of dread so heavy she could feel it pressing against her stomach. This went way beyond her nervousness at teaching Edgar Blake, though she was nervous about that. Surprising because there wasn’t a lot to be nervous about when you were a Sunday School teacher. You couldn’t be fired from the job. You couldn’t go wrong, really, and yet she struggled to get out of bed. She felt like a storm was coming, felt it so surely that she looked out the window, but all she saw was a blue sky and some clouds.
Maybe it was time to retire as a Sunday School teacher, she thought. She’d been doing it for thirty years, which was a long time. The President of the United States could only serve eight years. No point in doing it if there was no joy to it. In fact, the whole purpose of teaching Sunday School was to communicate joy.
She decided not to show the vegetable movie. Better to do something crafty, something that would occupy Edgar’s hands. Maggie got to church early and set up the classroom. She put out five glue sticks, just to be on the safe side, though she doubted five students would show up. It was soccer season. They wouldn’t have any students at all except that some of them did hockey and practiced on Saturdays. Funny to think that when she was growing up, church was so closely associated with athletes. Muscular Christianity. The YMCA.
Edgar burst into the classroom two minutes ahead of everyone else. His hair had been shaved off, which resolved one problem, but soon enough another problem emerged. He roared right over to the glue sticks and grabbed them. All five. In trooped Ambrosia Fletcher, on the verge of tears, as always, and the lovely Shu Chin, who, if the past was any predictor, would sit quietly for the next hour.
“Share the glue sticks,” Maggie said to Edgar.
He clutched them tightly to his chest. She didn’t feel like arguing, and so she went to the supply closet and retrieved five more glue sticks, one of which she handed to Ambrosia and one to Shu Chin. Edgar paused, and then grabbed up Ambrosia’s glue stick as well. She began to cry.
“Give that back,” Maggie said. “You’re being a bully.”
He stared at her implacably, a little like a shark.
“Peter Nelson,” she said, “or no, I mean Edgar Blake. Put down the glue stick.”
She sat down so she could look more clearly into his eyes. There had to be a way to reach this boy. “You’re being cruel.”
The little chickadee began to sing, the class pet. Edgar gazed at her, and then threw all the glue sticks at Ambrosia. “Take them,” he said.
She thought of a story her husband liked to tell about how President Kennedy handled Russian leader Khrushchev during the Cuban Missile Crisis. An agreement had been reached, but then Khrushchev sent a telegram saying he wanted to back out. Kennedy could have gone forward and launched an attack, but he chose to ignore the telegram. He allowed Khrushchev a face-saving moment, which many considered to be one of the triumphal decisions in American foreign policy. Maggie decided to allow Edgar a face-saving moment as well.
“Thank you,” she said. “Now, let’s talk about Adam and Eve.”
“I don’t want to glue anymore,” Ambrosia said.
“You don’t have to. Why don’t you color?”
The girl looked at Edgar like a rabbit eyeing a snake. “I don’t want to.”
“You can color next to me,” Maggie said, thanking God for Shu Chin, who throughout this whole fiasco sat quietly, reading the children’s Bible.
And then, in confirmation of the principle that no matter how bad a situation was, it could always get worse, Agnes appeared. She was the principal of the day. It was her job to remove unruly children from the Sunday School class. Never in all of Maggie’s years had she sent a student to the principal of the day. It violated everything she felt about Sunday School, but now, watching the look that played across Edgar’s face, a look of anger and triumph that reminded her of Peter in his prime, Maggie began to get a bad feeling.
“Trouble?” Agnes asked. She cocked her head.
“No trouble at all, Agnes,” Maggie said.
Agnes looked around the room brightly. “Peter helping you today?”
“Peter? No.”
“He wasn’t in church. I thought perhaps he was with you.”
“No,” Maggie said, and willed Agnes to go away, which she did eventually, leaving Maggie once more alone with Edgar, who had, while Maggie wasn’t looking, taken all the crayons from Ambrosia. He looked at Maggie. She looked back. She had given birth to a child. She had buried that child. She had buried her husband. She could face down this miserable child, spawn of Satan, Bender, she thought. Bender with his manicured hands stretched toward her house. Funny how some men got manicures.
Edgar lunged to take Shu Chin’s Bible, which he succeeded in grabbing out of her hands and throwing onto the floor.
Everyone hushed at that. Maggie could hear the minister’s voice projected through an intercom, talking about a tree and temptation. So much came back to trees. But she barely heard it as she swept forward and picked up the Bible and kissed it, an old tradition.
“Never throw the Bible on the floor,” she hissed. “People have died for this book. This book matters.”
She felt like all the anger she’d been carrying around for years, ever since her daughter died, so cruelly, was about to erupt into a terrible plume that would sear right out of her like a dragon. She was so angry she felt afraid. What was she capable of?
“Who died?” Edgar asked.
“Juliet,” she whispered.
“Who died?” he repeated, and she realized he was talking about the Bible. He wanted to know who had died for the Bible. Maggie couldn’t think, she was so upset, and the only name that came to mind was Khrushchev, who most certainly had not died for the Bible.
“Well, Thomas Cranmer for one. Have you heard of him?”
Ambrosia sank onto Maggie’s lap and began to suck her thumb.
“No.”
“He lived a long time ago. In England,” Maggie said, as she surreptitiously picked up all the glue sticks and put them away. “He loved the Bible and wanted everyone to be able to read it, even regular people, and so he made sure that copies of the English Bible were displayed in churches. King Edward, a boy of about your age, supported him, but then he died. The new queen didn’t agree with Cranmer’s religious views and she told him to recant, which means to say he was wrong. Then he had to sign his signature to some papers, and he used his right hand.”
“Why did he sign? I wouldn’t sign.”
“Probably not,” Maggie said, “but I imagine he was scared. He knew the queen was very powerful, and very angry, and quite mean. Her nickname was Bloody Mary.”
She looked out the window of the classroom, toward a little grove of magnolia trees. They were just starting to flower, the pinkish petals dewy, though Maggie knew within a week or so they would be blowsy. Nothing aged as quickly as a magnolia blossom. Some bedraggled forsythia huddled in a corner like teenagers from a party gone bad. Everything she thought about lately seemed to involve trees, Maggie realized, which brought her back, in her memory, to the sight of Marcus Bender lying dead under her oak tree.
“What happened then?” Edgar asked.
She wiped her eyes. “To Cranmer? Well, he wound up being sentenced to death. The queen had no mercy. And then, on the day of his execution, he said he was wrong to have ever recanted. They tied him to the stake, and the flame began to burn, and do you know what he did?”
“No.”
Both Edgar and Ambrosia look
ed at her intently. Even Shu Chin seemed intrigued.
“He took his right hand and he put it in the flame, so that it would burn first, and as it burned he said, ‘That unworthy hand.’ Though, of course, he wasn’t unworthy at all. He was very, very brave.”
The classroom was silent after that. Edgar surveyed his right hand. Ambrosia went over to the naptime rug and sat down, and they were sitting peaceably when the parents arrived to retrieve them. Ambrosia’s parents were running off to soccer practice, but Edgar’s mother stayed to help her clean up, though Maggie assured her it wasn’t necessary. She was so tired she had no conversation left in her. She wanted to go home. But Helen Blake was not to be deterred. In her own way, she was just as stubborn as her son, and so she put away the Bibles and the remaining crayons, and set the chairs back on the table.
“We learned about Thomas Cranmer today,” Edgar told her.
“Did you?” she said. She grinned at Maggie. “And here I thought you were going to learn some foolish thing about the twelve vegetables.”
“It was a near miss,” Maggie said.
Helen laughed. “He does love history. Thank you for taking the time with him. I know he’s not always easy.”
She looked exhausted. Her eyes had dark circles under them and her face was flushed, as though she’d just woken up, which Maggie suspected she had. Helen didn’t go to church. Instead she dropped Edgar off at Sunday School and then lay down on the couch in the church library and slept. There were some who felt she was using the church for free babysitting, but Maggie figured there were many different ways for a church to be a sanctuary.
“He wasn’t too much?”
“Not at all.”
“Well thank you, Ms. Dove. Sometimes I think you’re the best part of this town. Quite honestly, I don’t know why we moved here in the first place.” At that, her glasses fell on to the ground. She scooped them up and pressed them back on her nose.
“People might be a little reserved at first, but they’ll come around. You’ll see.”
“We’ve lived here for five years,” Helen said.
“Oh.”
Maggie did one last check to see that everything was put away, then locked up the room.
“It’s more than that,” Helen said. “Well, I’ll be honest. I think some of the people here are cruel. One of my best friends died here a couple of days ago, and now they’re saying he might have been murdered.”
“Marcus Bender?”
“Did you know him?” Helen said. She rubbed her wrist against her pale face. “I still can’t believe he’s gone. He never would have moved here if it weren’t for me. He would have stayed in the city, but then one day he came up to visit me and he saw the river, and well, you know how Marcus was about the river.”
“I do know.”
“When he was passionate about something, he was passionate.”
“Did you know him a long time?”
“We went to college together. Amherst. We were part of the honor society there, Marcus and his first wife, Char. I was so lost when I first got there, coming from Kansas, and they both took me under their wing. They were good friends to me.”
They started up the steps, in the direction of the parlor, and coffee hour. “His daughter Lorelei is the same age as Edgar. She had a bunch of developmental issues and they wanted to put her in special ed classes, but Marcus wouldn’t have it. He wanted her mainstreamed. He fought to get her tutors. He challenged them, wouldn’t let them get away with taking the easy way out.”
The church bells began to chime, a lovely sound. Automatically Helen reached for her son’s hand as they made their way up the steps.
“He did everything,” she said. “Met with the principal, the tutors, the special ed board. I don’t know how he did it all.”
Maggie couldn’t even picture the Bender girl except for a distant memory of someone dressed up as a princess. Someone sparkly who she noticed dumping a whole bucket full of candy into her trick-or-treat bag. But now Maggie felt badly that she didn’t know that about her father. That she didn’t know his kids.
“When I heard he had a heart attack, I wasn’t even that surprised. I thought it was because he was pushing himself so hard all the time. But now they’re saying he was poisoned.”
“I think they have a ways to go before they can prove that.”
“Who would want to murder Marcus?” Helen asked. “Everyone loved him.”
Edgar just stared at Maggie, as though he knew all the secrets to her heart, and the one time she would have wished for the boy to be bad, to distract his mother, he was good as gold.
“One of the police officers had a grudge against him, they’re saying. Some rogue officer who was selling drugs on the side.”
“No,” Maggie said. “No, you’re wrong about that. I know that police officer and he’s a good man.”
But after coffee hour was over, she thought she’d better go see what was happening with Peter. His name was coming up in too many conversations. It was a bad sign.
For the first time she felt a twinge of doubt. What if he had gone bad? Would she know it?
Maggie called Peter when she got home. “How are you doing?”
“Fine,” he said. His voice sounded slushed.
“Didn’t see you at church.”
“I’ve got a cold; I took medicine.”
She felt irritated with him, but that wasn’t fair. Maybe he had taken medicine; maybe he was sick; maybe it would all turn out right. Maybe she was just being pessimistic. She crawled into bed, waiting for it to be 5 o’clock. A person shouldn’t go to bed before five, she thought, but by 3:30 she was asleep and slept right through until 10 o’clock in the morning, right until five minutes past the moment that she was supposed to meet up with Iphigenia.
Chapter 16
Maggie wasn’t a fast runner, but she could get dressed quickly, so less than ten minutes passed between when she woke up, slid into her clothes and went power walking up Main Street.
Poor Iphigenia looked like a wilted fern, her normally vibrant hair flattened like a frightened dog’s ears, lines appearing on her face that had never been there before.
“I’m sorry I’m late,” Maggie said. “Let’s go get this over with.”
The breeze was surprisingly strong for April; winter hanging on for dear life. Already flowers that had bloomed only a week before were fluttering all over Main Street.
“Tscha,” Iphigenia said. “I was hoping you wouldn’t come. What’s wrong with your hair? Let me fix it before we go.”
“Don’t put this off any longer,” Maggie said. “Let’s get this done and then we can go out and celebrate.”
Doc Steinberg’s office was only two blocks away. It was in a large Victorian house, painted yellow, with a big American flag flying out front. It had belonged to the Steinberg family for years. Maggie had gone there, her mother had gone there. Doc Steinberg had driven her to the hospital with her daughter’s body. She’d stayed with Maggie through that entire terrible night, holding her hand when the ER doctor pronounced Juliet dead, holding her when she called to donate her daughter’s organs, driving her home, where Winifred and all the other members of her community were waiting for her, mourning.
The receptionist was a woman whose name Maggie could never remember, though she’d known her for years. That was the problem, that she’d known her for so long it would be embarrassing to call her by the wrong name. Victoria or Veronica?
Normally the wait for Doc Steinberg was excruciating, but they were the first appointment of the day and she swept out to see them. At the sight of her tall white-robed figure, the luxurious brown hair—because Doc Steinberg would not be pressured into highlights—Maggie felt a twinge of panic herself. Doc Steinberg was a good doctor, but she had no bedside manner at all. She believed in no sugarcoating.
Iphigenia could barely stand.
“I’ll just walk her in,” Maggie said.
“Of course.”
Poor
Iphigenia clutched her arm, shivering with fear. “You can do this,” Maggie said, though she was beginning to doubt it herself, and then she left her friend and went back into the waiting room.
Fifteen minutes passed. Then another fifteen minutes. Maggie talked to Veronica/Victoria about the Spring Fling, which always took place the first week in May. Then they talked about Bender’s funeral, which Veronica/Victoria had gone to. “Humanist,” she sniffed. “No mention of God, and no buffet.” They sealed his cremated remains in a special tube, which they put into the river, though supposedly the widow had reserved some, to have made into a ring. “They crush the ashes, like a diamond.”
Maggie thought she heard Iphigenia crying. For all she’d tried to reassure her friend, the thought of cancer terrified her. The body rebelling. Everything in disarray. Cells going after one another. But she also knew what she’d told Iphigenia was true, that it was survivable, and if Iphigenia had it, she’d beat it. Still, Maggie’s hands were shaking when the receptionist began listing all the people who’d been at the funeral. More than Maggie had expected, but then his children were young. She was surprised to hear Joe Mangione was there. She was ruminating over that when suddenly Iphigenia erupted into the waiting room.
“I’m done,” she squealed. She stamped her feet like a flamenco dancer. “There is nothing!”
“I’m so glad.”
“She wants me to have a mammogram but she said it will take me several months to get an appointment. So I don’t need to worry yet.
“Thank you,” she said, hugging Maggie. “Thank you for bringing me here.”
Maggie whispered a prayer of thanks, waved goodbye to Victoria/Veronica.
“Goodbye, Meredith,” Iphigenia sang out to the receptionist. Meredith? Then they started, linked arms, toward the door and suddenly Doc Steinberg was there.
Maggie turned to smile, but before she could go farther Doc Steinberg said, “Maggie, would you mind sticking around for a minute? I want to talk to you.”
Automatically Maggie put her hand over her heart. Could Doc Steinberg tell just by looking at her that she was sick? Had this all been an elaborate ruse for Iphigenia to bring her in for a checkup? But she had no symptoms.
